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Houdini, The Magician Who Debunked Magic, Could Not Bear To See The Great Rationalist [arthur Conan] Doyle Enchanted By Ghosts And Frauds. And So He Did What Any Friend Would: He Set Out To Prove Spiritualism False And Rob His Friend Doyle Of The Only Comforting Fiction That Was Keeping Him Sane. It Was The Least He Could Do.

-John Hodgman

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Houdini, The Magician Who

John Hodgman

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Houdini, The Magician Who Debunked Magic, Could Not Bear To See The Great Rationalist [arthur Conan] Doyle Enchanted By Ghosts And Frauds. And So He Did What Any Friend Would: He Set Out To Prove Spiritualism False And Rob His Friend Doyle Of The Only Comforting Fiction That Was Keeping Him Sane. It Was The Least He Could Do.

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My Memories Of Literary Agenting Are Of A Very Happy Time And There Are Surprising Reminders Of It Coming Back Now.

I Know Nothing About Letting Go.

This Is Something That The Nimblest Standup Comedians Learn, Over Time, To Handle Gracefully. They'll Go Between Prepared Material, Then They'll Respond To What's Happening In The Room And Weave It Back Into The Prepared Material And So On.

I Had The Pleasure Of Listening To Rickie Lee Jones' Flying Cowboys Album On Audio Cassette, Which Had Just Come Out At That Time Because I Am An Elderly Man.

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I Think In American Culture, We Put Value On Economic Success But Tell People You Don't Have To Be Economically Successful To Be Happy.

Any Time You Try To Create An Internet Meme, Automatic Fail. That's Like The Worst Thing You Can Do.

It Was Inevitable That In The Proliferation Of Media And Media Channels And The Natural Debasing Of Authority That Comes When You Make An Expert Of Someone Who Knows A Few Things And Can Be On Television And You Put The Word "expert" Underneath Them, That Is To Say Me, Then Eventually The Very Concept Of Expertise Itself Would Become Meaningless.

I Do Not Think That A Museum Needs To Engage With Pop Culture In Order To Make Itself Interesting To Museumgoers. Museums Are Already Interesting And Engaging With Pop Culture For Its Own Sake Is Just A Quick Way To Seem And Become Dated.

We Have All Been Empowered By The Web: Everyone With A Keyboard Can Now Effectively Broadcast To A National Audience. In A Sense, It Puts Each Of Us On The Same Footing As The Major Media Conglomerates, Except For Aol, Who Now Apparently Own All Our Thoughts And Teeth.

Just Because You See An Iceberg Does Not Mean That There Isn't Global Warming.

I Made An Impulse Buy Of A House In Maine To Make My Wife Happy And Now Have Gone Back Into Debt And It's All Started Over For Me.

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I Used To Enjoy The Anonymity Of Being A Literary Figure And Occasionally A Public Radio Figure.

I Don't Watch Television. And Certainly Not Ads; I Loathe Advertising.

Panic Is An Incredibly Catalyzing Creative Force. And Almost Out Of Sheer Necessity, I Found I Had To Talk About Myself And My Real Life As It Is Effectively Lived By Me.

Tonally, There Was No Discussion; I Just Don’t Know Any Other Way To Do It. I Don’t Want To Make People Feel Bad, And I Don’t Want To Make Their Problems Into A Joke. I Do Love Telling People When They’re Right And Wrong, But For The Most Part, It Was Always Going To Be About Real Fights Where People Have A Real Difference Of Opinion And A Real Dispute. I Want To Make Jokes, But I Also Want To Make A Decision That Is Fair.

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Terry Gross Has Never Had Me On Her Show And You Know, It's Her Show; She Sets The Agenda And That's Not Hodgman. But I'll Still Listen To It.

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I Am Not A Villain.i'm An Only-child Narcissist Monster, But I Wish No Ill, Nor Do I Wish For World Domination; What A Hassle That Would Be!

Once You're Out In A Place Where There's One Sheriff For The County, People Have To Learn How To Get Along With Each Other And That Means Going To The Dump Illegally And Dumping Your Garbage And Hoping The Guys Don't Call You On It And Being Terrified Of This To Your Core Until You Realize After Many Years That The Guys At The Dump Don't Really Care Where Your Garbage Is Coming From.

My Fame Is Due To Broadcast Television.

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I Think That I'm Reaching A Point In My Life And In My Career Where Soon It Will Be Important For Me To Get Out Of The Way And Let Younger, Hungrier, More Interesting People Do What It Is That I Do. Maine Is A Wonderful Place To Hide, Because No One Ever Looks For You There. And The Goal Of Every Person In Maine, Whether Native Or From Away, Seems To Be To Mitigate As Possible All Human Interaction. So It's A Good Place To Disappear In.

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I Believe That The Federal Government Should Be Laying Down Broadband Like Eisenhower Laid Down Interstates.

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Houdini, The Magician Who Debunked Magic, Could Not Bear To See The Great Rationalist [arthur Conan] Doyle Enchanted By Ghosts And Frauds. And So He Did What Any Friend Would: He Set Out To Prove Spiritualism False And Rob His Friend Doyle Of The Only Comforting Fiction That Was Keeping Him Sane. It Was The Least He Could Do.

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Lies Are Just Another Kind Of Storytelling, But With The Very Distinct And Enlivening Motive Of Desperation. Since Writers Are By Nature Desperate Creatures, They Usually Do A Pretty Good (or Pretty Awful, But Always Interesting) Job Of Lying.

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My Whole Creative Career Is A Product Of The Internet. ...i'll Take That Back. To Some Degree. My Fascination With Cultural Esoterica And Trivia And So On Was Well-formed Long Before I Got My First Aol Account.

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My Candidacy Is A Compelling Argument For My Candidacy. I Want To Be President.

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When I Listen To Music - I Don't Particularly Do It For Fun All That Much. It's Not A Big Part Of My Life, And I'm Not Really On Top Of What's Happening In The World Of Music In The Way I Was When I Was A Teenager.

Anyone Of Conscience Could Come Look At My Book And See It As An Esoteric Oddity Or Be Intrigued By It. It Could Happen Either Way On A Thousand Different Little Decisions Each Individual Might Make.

I Suspect That When The Truth Ceases To Be Heartbreakingly Funny, We Will Be In A Better Place And A Happier Society Over All.

Everything We Make In Life, Eventually, Is Sold For A Dollar Or A Penny Or Given Away.

People Who Run For President Seriously And People Who Become President Enter A Bizarre Secret Society In Which They Have Had An Experience That None Of Us Will Ever Have.

Life May Be Miraculous In Its Unlikelihood In The Universe, But It Would Be A Fallacy To Suggest That Its Rareness Makes It Inextinguishable.

What Would I Put In A Museum? Probably A Museum! That's An Amusing Relic Of Our Past.

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I Have A Lot Of Cultural References That Have Amassed In My Brain Like Shrapnel Over The Years That Are Meaningful To Me.

When You're Sitting Down And You're Blocked And You Just Start Writing And Something In Your Mind Just Clicks, You Start Seeing Connections And So On, You Really Do Feel Like You're Channeling Something Else.

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People Like What They Like. They're Gonna Do What They're Gonna Do.

I'm Not A Particularly Religious Person, But That Feeling Of Getting Transmissions From Someplace Else, Even If It's From Your Own Consciousness, Is Very, Very Real. To Me, At Least.

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Specificity Is The Soul Of Narrative.

All I Can Ask From Society Is That It Please Stop Telling Me Why I Should Like Sports.

I Actually Own A Copy Of My Own Book; That's How Dedicated I Am As An Author.

There's A Tradition In American Fiction That Is Deadly Serious And Earnest - Like The Steinbeckian Social Novel.

When You Think About It, The End Of The World Is A Little Bit Like Death: We All Know It's Going To Come Eventually, And As We Get Older, We Feel We See The Signs More And More Distinctly.

I Don't Really Collect Anything. I Mean, If I See A Piece Of Moxie Soda Memorabilia, I'll Probably Buy It. I'm A Sucker For Regional Soda Brands And Forgotten Histories And That Sort Of Thing.

I Would Say 70 Percent Of People Who Are In Therapy Are In Therapy Not Because Of Their Upbringing, Not Because Of Their Mean Sister Or Obsessions, But Because Of Anxiety Brought About By Lack Of Financial Security.

Comics Have A Problem, And That Is Continuity - The Obsession With Placing The Characters In An Existing World, Where Every Event Is Marked In Canon. You're Supposed To Believe That These Weepy Star Boys Of Now Are The Same Gung-ho Super Teens Fighting Space Monsters In The '60s, And They've Only Aged Perhaps Five Years.

A Stopped Clock Is Correct Twice A Day, But A Sundial Can Be Used To Stab Someone, Even At Nighttime.

For Many Years, People Would Say, "only Child? Must Have Been Terrible," And I Wanted To Say, "you Are Mentally Ill, Because It Was The Greatest." You Got All The Attention. You Never Had To Share Anything. No One Ever Ate Your Food. No One Ever Took Your Toys. But The Unintended Consequence Was That I Didn't Appreciate That Being Universally Loved Was Not Only Not Required For Happiness, But Also Not Possible.

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There Is A Need For Expertise, For Real Expertise. I'm Not Doing Much To Help That Cause, But I Think We Can Find The Healthy Balance Between Intellectualism And Anti-intellectualism. Jocks And Nerds May Come Together, I Believe It.

My Favorite Season Is Autumn, And Maine Is Lovely For That Reason. In Maine, Autumn Begins On July 29. That's When You Start Building A Fire In The Fireplace And The Leaves Literally Start Falling From The Trees. It Is A Cold And Rugged And A Beautiful Place That Reminds You With Its Many Death Traps - Its Painfully Cold Oceans, Its Sharp, Jagged Beaches, And Perilous Cliffsides - That Nature Doesn't Care Whether You Live Or Die.

First Of All, I Wish I Could Grow A Beard.

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The Villain Of Any Story Is Often The Most Compelling Character.

You Know The Old Saying: "history Is Written By The Winners. And Also, The Team Of Hand-picked Historians That The Winner Keeps Hidden Away In An Underground Bunker".

I Was Always Fascinated With The Way That Things Pop On The Internet - The Ways You Build Communities And Create Little Stories And Ideas That People Play Around With And Send Back To You.

What I Collect? Interesting Jobs. Always To My Thrill And Excitement, But Ultimately To My Exhaustion, I Collect Interesting Jobs. If An Interesting Job Comes Along, I Take It; That's Why I Do So Many Things. I'm Lucky To Be Able To.

The Very Idea That There Is No Truth, But Only The Filter Of Narrative Through Which Truth Is Invented Is Something I Learned At The Feet Of The Most Leftist Professors At Yale And Am Learning Again From Sarah Palin During The Vice Presidential Debate, And I Find That Very Disorienting.

This Is Not To Say There Are Not Chicagoans. But I Would Suggest That They Are A Nomadic People, Whose Lost Home Exists Only In Their Minds, And In The Glowing Crystal Memory Cells They All Carry In The Palms Of Their Hands: A Great Idea Of A Second City, Lit With Life And Love, Reasonable Drink Prices At Cool Bars, And, Of Course, Blocks And Blocks Of Bright And Devastating Fire.

As A Live Stand-up Comedy Performer, I Have The Benefit Of Choosing Real Entrance Music.

John Wilkes Booth And Lee Harvey Oswald Meet In Hell And Team Up To Assassinate Satan.

John Wilkes Booth

Why Certain Political Classes Want Purposefully To Keep Americans In A State Of Perpetual Debt And Uncertainty And Why Certain People Don't Want A Middle Class - Because Middle Class Creates A Certain Happiness. You Know What I Mean?

I Have An Unfortunate Compulsion. I Really Would Rather Not Do It, As It Is Very Nerve-wracking And Un-fun. But When It Works, There Is Nothing Like It.

The Reality Is That If You Want To Be In A Reality-based Community, You've Got To Respect Reality And That Means Calling It Bad When You See The Past Ahead And It Doesn't Look Good And Acknowledging When It's Going To Work.

When You're A Young Person, You Are Biologically Driven To Believe You Are Immortal, And That's Why You Engage In All Kinds Of Risky Behavior You Stop Once You Feel Death's Cruel Breath On Your Neck. I Think That As A Straight White Man In Particular, I Was Tempted To Believe That I Was Immortal And Eternal Because, After All, In This Culture, Straight White Dudes Are The Heroes Of Every Story That You See Or Read About With Very Rare Exception. So How Could The Story Go On Without The Hero, You Know?

One Can Always Come Up With Funny Lists And Jokes. You Know What? I Take It Back. Not Everyone Can Always Come Up With Funny Lists And Some Jokes. I'm Very Lucky To Have A Gift Where I Can Do That Pretty Ably.

I'm An Older, Wall-eyed, Overweight, Tweedy Writer Who Has Been Lucky Enough To Be Asked To Play Various Iterations Of Himself In A Certain Realm Of Popular Cultutre. That Gives Me Great Joy And Excitement, But I Don't Go To The Media Saying, "and I'm Also The World's Greatest Actor."

Writing For Me Always Requires Trickery. Tricking Myself Into Sitting Down, Letting Words Tumble Out Until You Find The Good Ones. It's Sort Of A Trance. And When A Piece Is Done, I Have Little Memory Of How I Wrote It, And Zero Confidence I'd Ever Be Able To Do It Again.

We Cannot Wholly Rely, As Though It Were Medieval Times, [on The Notion That] The Only Reality Is What We See In Front Of Us. There Are Germs. There Are Changes That Are Happening In Our Planet's Ecology That Are Happening Over Such A Long Period Of Time That We Cannot See The Changes.

Stories Hold Power Because They Convey The Illusion That Life Has Purpose And Direction. Where God Is Absent From The Lives Of All But The Most Blessed, The Writer, Of All People, Replaces That Ordering Principle. Stories Make Sense When So Much Around Us Is Senseless, And Perhaps What Makes Them Most Comforting Is That, While Life Goes On And Pain Goes On, Stories Do Us The Favor Of Ending.

From A Very Selfish Point Of View, I'm Enchanted By The Idea That A Politician Can Come Along And Speak Simply And Clearly And Truthfully To An Electorate As Though They Are Grown-ups And To Feel The Electorate Respond To That.

By The Time I Was Writing The Second Book, My Life Had Changed Rather Dramatically, Thanks To The Intervention Of Television, And I Needed To Find A Way To Discuss That. Otherwise The Big, Fake Book Would Not Be True On Some Level.

One Of The Things About Crowd Work That's So Exciting Is When You Discover A Character In The Audience Who's Interesting Or Funny, Who You Can Vibe Off Of. If Someone's Got A Weird Job That You Can Make Reference To Throughout, Or You Can Bring That Person Onstage - Humiliate Them, Or Celebrate Them! You Can Put People In Conversation With One Another. The Best Is When Something That They're Doing Can Reflect Back On Something That You're Doing.

By The Way, If I Have My Own Cult Of Personality With My Own Geodetic Dome In Western Massachusetts, I Will Have A Hurt Yurt For Anyone Who Crosses Me.

Cult Of Personality

Hosting A Tv Show Is A Full-time Job In Which Success Is Defined By It Never Ending.

I Believe That By Releasing "passing Interest/low Keepsake-value Literature" From The Burden Of Physicality, You Are Actually Releasing The Words From Their Worst Liability: The Price And Inconvenience Of Actual Bookness.

I Am Not An Internet Superstar.

You Know, I Began My Life As A Creative Person Writing True Things For Magazines And Telling Some Very Honest, Straightforward Personal Essaying For This American Life, But Until Someone Forces You, With A Deadline, To Really Observe Your Life - Unless You're Motivated To Do It Yourself - There's So Many Stories That You Miss.

I Say, If You're Going To Eat A Creature Alive, You Have To Expect Some Screaming. That Is The Carnivore's Burden.

All Books Should Be Trilogies; I Mean I Think We All Agree On That.

Generally Speaking, I, Like Anyone Else Who Does Anything Publicly, Like It When People Like What I Do, And Would Like To Hear As Much.

So Much Of Creativity Is The Feeling That You're Either Getting A Gift From Some Other Dimension Or Some Other Part Of Yourself.

Truth May Be Stranger Than Fiction, Goes The Old Saw, But It Is Never As Strange As Lies.

That Which Is Hard To Do Is Best Done Bitterly.

I'm A Personality - Like A George Plimpton Who Effectively Plays Himself In A Bunch Of Different Roles, Or A Paul Lynde-type Character.

I Naturally Own A Lot Of Very Old Magazines. And I Enjoy Going To Old Magazines Because The Advertisements In Those Magazines Tended To Have Thousands Of Words Of Copy In Them.

Only The Nerds Will Save The Earth.

I Would Definitely Make Eggs For The Rest Of My Life If I Could.

I Realized That Even In A World Of Proliferating Media Venues, Online And In Print, And On Tv And On Countless Cable Channels, The Idea That I Could Be Considered An Expert On Chronic Knee Pain Was I Think Troubling For Society, But Very Exciting For Me.

Unfortunately For Humanity, I've Gotten Into The Habit Of Providing My Own Closing Music For Shows By Singing A Song And Playing The Ukulele.

Here's The Thing: I Am Not Only A Creature Of Civilization, I'm An Asthmatic Person. I Will Only Live So Long As I Have Stockpiled The Proper Inhalers. I'm Effectively A Cyborg. You Know How In Jurassic Park, They Bred Those Dinosaurs With The Lysine Deficiencies, So If They Ever Got Off The Island, They'd Die? That's Me.

I Am A Marginally Employed Person Who Can Escape With My School Teacher Wife To The Waters Of Maine For Much Of The Summer.

If You Have Not Seen It, Football Is A Game In Which Men Shove One Another Back And Forth For No Reason. They Do Not Choose How, When, Or Whom They Shove. They Are Doing This In Order To Please One Angry Old Man On The Sidelines. This Old Man Is Called The 'coach' Or 'yelling Surrogate' Dad Who Will Never Be Happy.

I Had Some Very, Very Fond Memories Of The People I Worked With And The Authors I Worked With - And I Won't Mention Any Names - But As I Have Been Traveling Through Rural Maine Over The Past Few Weeks, One Of My Favorite Things To Do Is To Go Into Bookstores On The Side Of Rural Routes And Paw Through The Old Copies Of Tom Clancy And Trevanian Books They Have In There For Weird Old 1970s Thrillers That I Haven't Read Yet.

A Lot Of Media That That I Want To Consume, I Don't Want To Have To Own Forever And Ever. It's Not Like Real Estate.

Just A Small-scale Cult Of Personality, Maybe Raise A Geodetic Dome Out In Western Massachusetts And Make People Wear Jumpsuits And Give All Their Possessions To Me.

Cult Of Personality

My Career As A Magazine Writer Was Largely Prefaced On The Idea Of Curiosity, To Go On Adventures And Weasel My Way Into The Lives Of People That I Admire.

Creating Fake Facts Does Require A Measure Of Haphazard Research, Insofar As They Need To Not Just Be Possible, But Also Interesting.

There Is No Ritual That Enhances Creativity Other Than Just Starting.

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